2019 The Play’s the Thing – an Introduction to Shakespeare’s Plays

Course Code: U1923

Maybe you remember reading Julius Caesar in a classroom at school, or maybe you saw an Open Air Production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream one summer’s evening, and you were left wondering why people make such a fuss about Shakespeare. In this course, we will consider a representative few of his plays, trying to work out how he structures his plots, how he develops his characters, how he inter-weaves serious themes with punning slapstick, and, most of all, how he does all this within the span of two hours on a public stage. The selected plays will be from the traditional genre usually labelled ‘Comedy’ (As You Like It), ‘History’ (probably Henry V) and ‘Tragedy’ (King Lear or Othello or Hamlet), but will also include two that to my mind don’t fit neatly into those categories: The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest.